Before he could be officially cleansed and readmitted into decent Maori society, his clothing and furniture had to be destroyed, and his kitchen abandoned.

By such means did this--to us--ridiculous superstition secure reverence for the dead and some avoidance of infection.

To this end the professional grave-digger and corpse-bearer of a Maori village was _tapu_, and lived loathed and utterly apart.
Sick persons were often treated in the same way, and inasmuch as the unlucky might be supposed to have offended the gods, the victims of sudden and striking misfortune were treated as law-breakers and subjected to the punishment of _Muru_ described in the last chapter.
Death in Maori eyes was not the Great Leveller, as with us.

Just as the destiny of the chief's soul was different from that of the commoner or slave, so was the treatment of his body.
A slave's death was proverbially that of a dog, no man regarded it.
Even the ordinary free man was simply buried in the ground in a sitting posture and forgotten.

But the departure of a chief of rank and fame, of great _mana_ or prestige, was the signal for national mourning.